All the King's Men (1946)

Robert Penn Warren was a poet and academic at least as much as he was a novelist, which no doubt accounts for the lovely language and meticulous structuring of what is probably his single best known work. It's arguable that the denseness of it verges on a kind of suffocating quality, in much the same way as, say, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man—worthy works both, very much so, but they can feel as if they have been pruned and worked within an inch of their lives, a good deal of natural energy extruded. All the King's Men is often tagged as the greatest American novel about politics, and since I can't think of a better one I'm happy to go along with that. Based rather self-consciously on the figure of Huey Long, the wildly popular and fanatical governor of Louisiana who went on to become a Depression-era U.S. senator before being assassinated, it tells a number of stories simultaneously: Willie Stark's most obviously, the Long character, but also that of the narrator Jack Burden and his involvement with the Stanton family, whose patriarch preceded Stark in the Louisiana governorship. It's a pretty big novel, running to more than 600 pages in my trade paperback edition, and it addresses with a good deal of veracity the tiny details of confused personal lives as much it does the broad strokes of a public life verging on fascism via the circuitous and flawed routes of populism. Warren's singular achievement is making it clear how well-intentioned and intelligent Stark (and perhaps Long) was from the first, corrupted eventually starting only from the necessities presented by American elections—and probably more accurate to say by the human nature represented by them, on both sides, voters and candidates equally. There's plenty of gray to go around here. Huey Long, for as much as he was a shrewd and calculating propagandist, also managed to implement one of the most effective and far-reaching progressive agendas in the country, making his career attacking the corporate excesses in Louisiana of Standard Oil and going on in his governorship to create far-reaching public works programs. Long's education programs, as just one example, brought literacy to tens of thousands of Louisianans. Warren paints Willie Stark as a man who starts out as an earnest rail-splitter type and learns to grasp the levers of power; that power brings him to ruin. It may or may not be true to Long—I don't know that much about him—but pieces of the basic lessons apply today as much as ever. I can see pieces and elements of Nixon, Carter, the first George Bush, Mitt Romney, and many more in Willie Stark. If there's one novel you're going to read about American politics, I'm with the majority that this is the one to choose.

In case it's not at the library.